Rousing Round Top

There's still a chance to hear great classical music in a perfect setting at Round Top International Music Festival, it continues through July 16th.  Here are some examples from last weekend at Festival Hill:
JoAnn Falletta leads Strauss' Don Juan:


Middle movement of Christopher Rouse's Flute Concerto with Carol Wincenc:


Elgar's Enigma Variations:

Falletta at Round Top

This weekend the 40th Season of Round Top International Music Festival continues with guest Conductor JoAnn Falletta, flutist Carol Wincenc and the Texas Festival Orchestra. Performance Today's Fred Child will narrate Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale and there's an all Beethoven chamber music concert that starts things off this Saturday!
Find out more here.

Part 1

Part 2

From two years ago

The Magic of Round Top

Classical Spotlight: JoAnn Falletta

Enjoy a talk with JoAnn Falletta, conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Virginia Symphony. She is also a Naxos recording artist and spends a little bit of her summer at the Round Top Festival here in Texas.
This is an exclusive interview with host John Clare covering new releases, her conducting background and upcoming projects:

Listen for JoAnn's recordings on KPAC & KTXI, and for her return to Round Top next summer! Classical Spotlight returns this Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at its new time, 1:00pm.

Falletta @ Round Top

The International Festival-Institute at Round Top continues through July 11th, in Round Top, TX. Last weekend, grammy award winning conductor JoAnn Falletta presented a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Ballets Russes. John Clare spoke to her about the festival:



The festival continues this weekend with a Homage to Haydn, American music on July 4th and 5th, and ends with fireworks July 11th in a program of Tchaikovsky & Beethoven.

New Release: Mr. Tambourine Man

The latest release of the Buffalo Philharmonic and JoAnn Falletta is music by John Corigliano, Hallucinations from the film Altered States, and his songs for soprano and orchestra, Mr. Tambourine Man. Yes, that Mr. Tambourine Man. You know, Bob Dylan.

But it's not what you think.

Corigliano says: A colleague suggested that I look into the poetry of the songs of Bob Dylan. Having not yet listened to the songs, I decided to send away for the texts only … and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard – and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language … these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete … I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art – crossover in the opposite direction, one might say. Dylan granted his permission, and I set to work.

John Clare recently spoke to Falletta about this new release

Windows Media File MP3 file

Read more about what Falletta has been up to lately!

Falletta to NCA

American conductor JoAnn Falletta has been appointed to be a Member of the National Council on the Arts, the advisory body of the National Endowment for the Arts. The United States Senate confirmed President George W. Bush's nomination of JoAnn Falletta to serve on the NCA on October 3, 2008 for a term extending through September 3, 2012.

Ms. Falletta joins a list of distinguished artists and arts advocates who have served on the National Council on the Arts since its establishment in 1964, including Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern. The National Council on the Arts advises the NEA Chairman on programs and policies. Council members review and make recommendations to the Chairman on grant applications, funding program guidelines, and national initiatives. Members are chosen for their widely recognized knowledge of the arts, their expertise or profound interest in the arts, and their established record of distinguished service or achievement in the arts. "I am very excited to have been appointed to serve on the NCA, and look forward to having the opportunity to promote the importance of the arts in America", says JoAnn.

Last week, Naxos released Falletta's ninth contribution to its label, the world premiere recording of John Corigliano's Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poem of Bob Dylan with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Hailing her as a "leading force for the music of our time", the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers honored her this past Spring with her 10th ASCAP award. Falletta, who studied with Leonard Bernstein while she was a student at the Juilliard School, is the host of the nationally broadcast PBS television special, The Berlin Celebration Concert, which celebrates Bernstein's historic performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, on Christmas Day 1989. The program can currently be seen on multiple dates through December 2008.

JoAnn currently serves as Music Director of both the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony, and guest conducts many of the world's great symphony orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony, Rotterdam Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony.

More information on Maestro Falletta may be found at JoAnnFalletta.com. For more information on the National Council on the Arts appointment, visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080926-20.html